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A diagram of nearly all the characters
in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,
with connections and relations shown thereamong.

UPDATE Summer 2011: Original full-size printed posters are avaliable from Start Here Mart.

As of February 28, 2011, posters are no longer for sale. Please feel free to download the PDF by clicking the black circle above.

Thanks to everyone who ordered a poster, offered support, and blogged or otherwise sent around links to this page. This site will be closed not indefinitely but until further notice, while I travel. Please check back after April, or follow twitter.com/sampotts for updates.

Thanks for all your support and nice words.

2.28.2011

About the poster

The images above are taken from the poster. I suggest downloading the PDF to get a sense of whether it's something you'd like to pay for. The poster is 36" x 24" and was printed offset with two colors (black and yellow) on 80# Lynx Opaque (Smooth White) paper. The poster was printed at Rolling Press in Brooklyn and I highly recommend using them for all your printing projects.

Orders for the poster are handled by PayPal. You don't need a PayPal account to place an order. I'm happy to ship anywhere in the world. Posters are rolled and shipped Priority (1-3 days) by the US Postal Service in official USPS mailers.

About the PDF

The PDF is a modified version of the poster: at 34 x 22 inches it's slightly smaller than the poster so as to print reasonably well on 4 tiled sheets of 11x17 paper. Some adjustments were necessary to avoid putting names on the seams of the sheets, but the PDF contains the same information as the poster. The PDF is fine, but the poster looks a lot better, unless peering at tiny words and lines on your tiny laptop is what you like.

Our Policy and Your Guarantee

We aim to be your one-stop destination for all of your Infinite Jest–diagram-related needs. Ordering is as simple as clicking a button and typing your billing and shipping information accurately. (I am still using PayPal, with great regret and frustration.) Don't forget, as some have, to include your street address. Just saying.

If your poster arrives damaged or otherwise unregiftable (ahem), contact me using the contact form below and I'll arrange a replacement. This is a personal project running on weak coffee and an old laptop, but there's no reason you should pay for shoddy customer service.

— Sam Potts
Updated Dec. 29, 2010

Some probably obvious things to note

This diagram is not in any way an explanation or synopsis of the plot. It's a diagram of the connections among the characters.

It's not spatially denotative. That is, where names appear is somewhat important but not to-the-letter accurate in terms of showing the relative strength of relationships between characters, or in terms of showing how characters relate to each other in the time of the novel or in the space of the book. All of my attempts to add layers of data to the diagram led to almost immediate over-complication and confusion. Thus, there is no thickness or color of line to denote the greater or lesser importance of a connection between characters. Because family is an important theme of the novel, I've shown where connections are by family with a dotted line. There's no change in type size to denote the importance of a given character. Etc.

It's really, really hard to know where exactly to delimit the Great Concavity. Where the novel is vague, a map must be specific, even when it is being demapped. I did the best that makes sense to me.

Most important, this diagram is not any kind of substitute for really reading Infinite Jest. It's not even close. That's obvious, but I mention it because there other projects out there that are efforts to offer a different way of reading a narrative text. This is not that. The best I can hope for in terms of this diagram's relationship to Infinite Jest is that it's a) as accurate as I could make it and b) a reminder of the seeminlgy endless details and pleasures to be found in Wallace's masterpiece.

Thanks.

For taking the time to look over early drafts and offer improvements:

This project would have been infinitely more difficult without the following online resources:

— Sam Potts